Reintroduction of capital punishment in Russia would be retrograde

Feb 13 2013

Ajay Kamalakaran

Russian Interior Minister Vladimir Kolokoltsev: "I may incur anger from opponents of the death penalty. But as a citizen, not as a minister, I don't think it would be wrong to exercise this punishment for such criminals." Source: Kommersant

India, the land of Mahatma Gandhi, should follow Russia’s example and introduce a moratorium on the death penalty.

It was a mere coincidence that on the day
when people in India were bursting firecrackers over the execution of Afzal
Guru, (one of the conspirators of the 2002 attack on India’s parliament) a
senior Russian minister said in his personal capacity that he supports the
death penalty. “I may incur anger from opponents of the death penalty. But as a
citizen, not as a minister, I don't think it would be wrong to exercise this
punishment for such criminals,” Russian Interior Minister Vladimir Kolokoltsev
said in a television interview, when referring to murders of girls in Tatarstan
and the Irkutsk region.

Kolokoltsev’s comments have led to heated
debates in Russia over whether the country should lift the moratorium on
capital punishment, which was imposed by Boris Yeltsin. Much like India, Russia
is a country where passions run high and can easily be ignited by a media that
has too much power to influence popular sentiment.

Those supporting the death penalty in both
countries insist that life imprisonment isn’t enough for the most heinous of
crimes. In Russia, the argument I have heard often is that the state and the
people by default shouldn’t subsidise an easy existence. Life in a Russian
penal colony is anything but comfortable and human rights organisations have
often claimed that inmates are subject to the worst kind of torturous routines.

Many Indians, while at least agreeing that
prisons in the country are in a deplorable state, believe that hardened
criminals adjust to the appalling conditions and don’t regret their crimes. The
fact is that it is far worse for a criminal to spend 30 or 40 years in a prison
than to take the easy way out in the form of an execution. While the families
and loved ones of victims of crime will spend years in mourning, the death
penalty essentially offers a way for criminals to escape a punishing routine to
last out their existence. The worst criminals are spared the anguish of rotting
in a dingy, smelly, dark, disease-infested prison for decades.

Then there is the grave danger of capital
punishment being misused by regimes in the future to settle scores or make
examples. Even worse is when a person is falsely convicted for a crime that he
or she did not commit. No legal system is fool-proof and a life lost is lost
forever. If Czar Alexander II didn’t change his mind in the last second, the
world would have lost one of the greatest writers of all time in Fyodor
Dostoyevsky.

India has had its share of falsely
convicted people getting executed. It’s despicable that there are 476 convicts
on death row at the moment in the land of the Buddha and Mahatma Gandhi! India
will never be considered a civilized country as long as the “educated class”
call out for blood on the streets and when many citizens publicly celebrate the
executions of criminals.

Boris Yeltsin was one of the most controversial
figures in Russian history, but his imposition of a moratorium on the death
penalty was one of the most enlightened decisions ever made by any leader in
the country. The moratorium firmly moved Russia in the direction of the
European family of nations. Since a large number of Russians consider
themselves Europeans, it’s only fair they stand by core European values, of
which the respect for life is fundamental. It would be a retrograde step for
Russia to even reconsider imposing capital punishment again, no matter what the
circumstances.

Tailpiece:
Those that argue that capital punishment is a
deterrent to terrorism would be well-advised to remember that the Chechen
‘Black Widows’ and the 26-11 terrorists weren’t the least bit afraid of dying
before they killed scores of people in Moscow and Mumbai.